


from hell, with love

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Captivity, Consensual Violence, Demon Summoning, Demons, F/M, Folklore, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Mythical Beings & Creatures, Necromancy, Temporary Character Death, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-10-30 11:29:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17827718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: Macabre shenanigans in drabble form, as prompted by the RFFA and fronds.





	1. lovebites #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'heart'

*

Surprise crossed her face when she pulled back the layers of skin and muscle and bone over his chest and found nothing underneath.

“I lost it when I was young,” Ben told her, resting one hand over hers.

Her skin was cold to the touch: her hair hung wet over her shoulders. She had gone diving down into the dark sea to find her own heart; instead, she had found his lack of one.

“Alright,” Rey said, and lifted her golden eyes to his. Her gaze kindled a fire in the hollow space inside him. “Then we’ll get it back.”

*


	2. lovebites #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'red'

*

The mouth was a problem.

She’d coaxed the blue-tinged blood out of his extremities, fingers and toes restored to a less obviously-cadaverous shade. He was still peaky, moreso than he’d been in life, but he no longer looked like a frostbite victim so Rey figured he’d get over it eventually.

The lips, though—there was nothing doing there. The blood that had gathered there while he languished in the grave remained, lending his full mouth a ruddy lushness at odds with the pallor of the rest of him.

Rey scowled down at the corpse.

They were just so damned  _red._

*


	3. little monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *

Instead of the dead silence she’s accustomed to, the bond opens to the sound of a woman singing.

Rey moves towards the familiar figure slumped in a chair by the viewport, only half-listening as the unseen chanteuse declares, over an upbeat backing track, the inscrutability of her sabacc face.

Ben stares into space with glazed eyes, mouthing the lyrics to himself. His scar is daubed with silver paint; his lips shimmer with it.

“I loved her when I was younger,” he whispers.

“Who?” Rey demands, baffled.

A single tear descends his glittering cheek, the very picture of forlornness.

“Lady Gungan.”

*


	4. rusalka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [mickleburger](http://mickleburger.tumblr.com/)

*

“There’s a boy down here,” Rey says, gesturing with one hand to the river in which she floats. The sculling motion of her arm sends ripples dancing across the sun-dappled surface, obscuring the subaqueous kingdom of the river-folk with veils of shimmering green.

Finn squints. It’s not the strangest thing she’s ever said, but it must come close.

“I think he’s a prince,” she goes on. “He’s pretty, and his hands are soft as mud. He sleeps below the water where the light never touches.” Her eyes glint: she extends a hand to Finn. “Would you like to see him?”

*


	5. kitsune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [pythia](http://pythiablogs.tumblr.com/)

*

Her fur is thick and lustrous, but the feeling of nakedness is acute. No one has ever seen her like this.

No one who stayed, anyway.

She lets the bone crown slip from her hands and then they are not hands at all but their trembling still betrays her nervousness.

Ben’s white throat moves as he swallows. The jittery little motion makes her think of a rabbit, cottontail darting through the snow; he murmurs her name in soft wonderment but she discarded things like names along with her human form. She is something else now.

His hands are shaking too.

*


	6. mike wazowski

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> me and the anon who sent this are gonna have words

*

Their supplies are running on fumes. They’ve been taking shifts to sleep for weeks.

And there’s a small, round… _thing_  huddled on his pillow.

“What the hell?”

Drawn by his voice, Rey ducks around him and scoops the creature up. She turns to show it to him, like this makes things any clearer. “He’s a porg.”

Finn watches her tickle it under the chin, the little animal nuzzling into her hand with a croon of delight. He sighs. Of course it’s Rey’s pet.

“I suppose there’s no use in telling you to put that thing back where it came from?”

*


	7. banshee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [southerlyns](https://southerlyns.tumblr.com/)

*

The scream builds inside her as she watches Han Solo walk towards the ghoul on the bridge. She can feel it clawing its way up her throat like bile; she can feel it  _ripping_  free from her chest when the scarlet lightsaber ignites.

Then Finn falls, and Ren too, and still her ears ring with the echo of the shriek.

She tumbles into Leia’s arms and for a moment the scream inside her goes silent, replaced by the blooming realisation that this woman is  _like her._

She takes one look at Luke Skywalker and feels it begin to build again.

*


	8. rival vampires

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [thievesguilding](https://thievesguilding.tumblr.com/)

*

By the fifth moon he’s come to expect her, but he still doesn’t know her name.

If Ben were human she would need his permission to be here. The irony does not escape him.

“This land belongs to me,” he growls, in the voice that sends grown men quaking to their knees.

The girl looks unimpressed. “Says who?”

It could hardly be more overt a challenge, given the defiant tilt to her jaw and the fact that she is covered in blood (she’s normally a fastidious eater, he’s had the opportunity to observe; licks between her fingers and cleans her cheeks like she can’t bear to let a drop go to waste, but this time Ben had surprised her mid-supper and she’s still a gory mess).

He advances, expecting her to give ground. She does not.

“Says me,” he warns.

She drags the back of one hand across her mouth and bares her teeth in a macabre grin. Ben blinks, struck by the sudden wild, outlandish urge to lick her bloody cheek.

Was the skin beneath as golden as the rest of her?

Her tongue flicks out over her lip like she’d heard the thought. “Not from where I’m standing.”

*


	9. a proper prodigy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [mickleburger](http://mickleburger.tumblr.com/)

*

He had not imagined, when he fled the academy and surrendered himself to the mercy of the voices in his head, that he would have to call anyone  _master_ again.

Darkness engulfs the galaxy: darkness has engulfed any trace of the boy he was.

 _I have faith in you,_  had been one of Snoke’s favourite refrains.  _I have hope, because of you. You were meant for more than this, young sky-walker. There is a destiny that awaits you, out in the stars._

Ben watches those stars burn now, and wonders if this was what the old man had in mind.

*


	10. lovebites #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'love'

*

He’s been testing his restraints again.

Rey clicks her tongue at the sight of his bruised knuckles. She knows he doesn’t mean it; that he gets angry sometimes and doesn’t know where to put it—she feels that way too, occasionally, but she learned young that rage gets you nowhere.

Ben burrows into her touch when she lifts a hand to his cheek; to show him she isn’t upset, not really. She understands why he fights: no-one likes being cooped up.

But—he must know what they’ll do to him if they find him. Really, he’s safest here.

With her.

*


	11. lovebites #4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'balance'

*

Autumn gilds the trees under whose swaying limbs he chases the ghost-like figure.

Winter holds the world in its frostbitten grasp; the saber throws ice-blue light across the scavenger’s snarling face and in that frigid midnight Ben almost welcomes the burn of it scything through him.

The earth splits open like his flesh: all the souls of the underworld are singing his name.

Somewhere on the other side of the void is summertime, clear skies and green fields, his mother’s voice and a boy with flowers in his hair.

He looks into the girl’s blazing eyes and follows her down.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> innocent prompters, hoping for something romantic probably: :)  
> me, about to make it weird: :}


	12. yog-sothoth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sent by [leofgyth](https://leofgyth.tumblr.com/)

*

She whom starfarers know as the five thousand starvations resides in the space between spaces; the sapphire-flushed arteries of cosmic corporeality, where without all time and matter she beats her fists against the membranous walls of reality itself.

Empires fall, and rise, and fall again to dust in her eyes.

Out beyond the veiled night she dwells, whence their last remnants fled into the labyrinthine unknown: her form is of endless beams of coruscating light and shadow, burning stars and grasping void; need incarnate, she turns upon herself in her unappeasable hunger and consumes her own past.

And—she waits.

*


	13. slayer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Rey is an amazon warrior who thinks fame/monster slaying will make her family want her back, but the monster who has been terrorizing the land Kylo Ren earns her compassion instead.' - anon

*

I thought you would be—I don’t know. Uglier.

Stupid thing to think. Scales and horns and too many teeth don’t make a monster. I know that.

A bright sword doesn’t make a hero.

But I thought you would be different.

There are so many stories about you: about the stolen children, and the curse, and the monster that can’t be slain.

You’re why I’m here. They sent me to kill you, to find their son and bring him home.

Imagine loving someone that much.

I can’t.

But I gave them my word and here I am; nobody, here to gamble herself for somebody.

(He’s somebody’s son, that makes him someone. I’m nobody’s daughter because nobody wanted me. Nobody will send heroes after me.)

To be honest, I thought they were deluded. I came here because there’ll be songs sung across the world about the one who kills you: I didn’t actually expect to find him alive.

But you’re him.

I knew it the moment I looked in your eyes. I don’t know how—you have your mother’s eyes, but you didn’t then. I just knew.

You’re him.

And they want you back.

And I’m going to kill you anyway.

*


	14. ifrit

*

The name on the page said ‘Rey.’ Oddly simple, for a demon, and yet it seemed to him like fate.

The spirit chose to arrive on this plane on the wings of a desert storm, the howl of burning winds and excoriating sands lashing at the pentacle’s edge as Kylo completed the ritual. When the haboob receded there stood a young woman dressed in white on the other side of the chalk, watching him with avian golden eyes.

It wasn’t what he had expected from a demon of her power. The higher orders were showy things, he had read, with millennia of practice in terrorising humans. Kylo wasn’t sure what he had expected from his first foray into summoning afrits—something more ghoulish, maybe, an eldritch monstrosity crafted from history’s nightmares to scare him shitless—but it wasn’t this quiet, understated show of might.

The entity’s piercing gaze threw him.

“Rey,” he said, and her head tilted towards him. She had freckles, he noted abruptly. “I am Kylo Ren.”

The spirit nodded, but he had already lost her interest: her eyes fell to the pentacle and he knew then she was searching for any weakness in its construction, for anywhere he might have slipped up in the enchantments that bound her to this realm.

She would find nothing. He had been thorough. The demon wasn’t going anywhere.

* 

From somewhere far below a shout rang out. His  _father_  was calling to him, but that wasn’t what made Kylo’s blood run cold.

It was the words he spoke.

The afrit’s eyes flew back to his, alight with triumph, and whatever faint hope Kylo held that she hadn’t heard died as cold fear flooded his veins.

In horror, he watched her lips form the shape of a word.

_Ben._

She knew his name.

*


End file.
